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  • Women at the Well.Com
  • Pesha Joyce Gertler (bio)

During my year of recovery from brain surgery, the women in my healing circle sent almost-daily email messages of support and encouragement. Throughout this dark and luminous journey, their words sustained me, transforming my email into a reincarnation of that ancient well where women once gathered to share their lives.

I go to the well     where the women gather I go to the well     of healing waters. The women offer sips     from teaspoons, cups, buckets. Yet some days the well is bare     as a blank screen. Still, I go to the well     parched for the silken flow of their words     washing over and into me, filling the dry river beds     like an underground sea [End Page 47]

where I dive for the lustre     of anemone and pearl. I go to the well     of sacred space I go to the well     where the women gather.

Pesha Joyce Gertler

Pesha Joyce Gertler is poet, teacher and founder of a women's writing community (in 1981 and still thriving). She grew up in Brooklyn in an extended family of storytellers who taught her how language can open doors. Her immigrant grandmother who could neither read nor write in English taught her how language can also shut doors. She has walked in between these two worlds ever since, especially last year, as Seattle's Poet Populist. (For more details, see www.peshajoycegertler.com).

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